Arquivo para December, 2021
History, the great clearing and parousia
03
Dec
Christmas is near and the birth of Jesus is a historical fact because
the Census ordered by the emperor of Rome Caesar Augustus, regarding the date there is controversy for it would be between 4-5 BC, when Quininus was Governor of Syria as described in the Bible (Lc 2.2), but it is certain that the census was carried out and this was precisely the reason why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem, where the prophecy said that from there the savior would be born, and thus he “was numbered among men”.
History is also punctuated by divine interventions, in the decadence of Rome the monasteries were born, where the culinary culture, the first guilds and offices and also an earlier stage of printed writing is carried out, through the copyists, the first schools and later the first universities, with a strong theological influence as it could not be otherwise, but this is all history, also in the renaissance art and culture had a strong influence (theological).
We enter modernity, the work that we read punctually in this week’s posts “all in the same boat” by Sloterdijk, mentions an important fact, in addition to citing the classic work of the Decamerão by Boccaccio as “small community in the midst of the big disaster” ( Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 75), makes an analysis of the Black Death (which happened in the 130’s) and which devastated Europe with more than 100 million people dead when the population was much smaller than today, and its political influence.
In a footnote he cites the work of Henrik Siewierki (translated by Estação Liberdade in 2001) “A mass for the city of Arras” where he analyzes the psychological and political consequences of the plague, also the psychologist Franz Renggli, in his book Self-destruction by abandonment , developed the hypothesis of the influence on modernity of the plague, and also of the degradation of the mother-child relationship that would have caused a kind of immunological, collective and psychosomatic weakness that favored the virus of that plague.
All this analysis is interesting in the midst of the Pandemic’s return to Europe, while it is undoubtedly a scourge, it can fuel a new clearing on our community, that is, the idea of a mutual and solidary defense in view of a catastrophe even greater than the one we’ve already encountered.
All this analysis is interesting in the midst of the Pandemic’s return to Europe, while it is undoubtedly a scourge, it can fuel a new clearing on our coimmunity (category of Sloterdijk), that is, the idea of a mutual and solidary defense in view of a catastrophe even greater than we have already encountered.
It serves to “make the paths smooth”, as the biblical reading says when John, the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, announced in the desert using the words of the prophet Isaiah: “this is the voice of the one who cries out in the desert: ‘prepare the way of the Lord , make your paths straight’” (Lk 3,4) and it seems favorable to our time of scourge and desert.
It is important to remember that the first two weeks of Christmas celebrate not the coming of Jesus in Bethlehem, but the Parusia, that is, the preparation for his second coming.
Cultural diversity and hopes
02
Dec
In his book “In the same boat: essays on hyperpolitics” Peter Sloterdijk
points out that: “historical appearance teaches every observer that human groups in pioneer regions, during the last three or four thousand years, must have been able to sail on their old rafts of such that groupings of rafts could emerge in great style” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 73), which means that old cultural habits resist time, even though I consider “mentally poor and yet significant the term ‘culture’” . (idem).
It emphasizes that the decay of superstructures “reveals that they have almost nothing to give to individuals in their efforts to continue life” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 74), and more than that, it can be recognized that “as soon as the opus decays commune, people can only regenerate as smaller units” (idem).
Thus, it is in these smaller units that a new opus commune can be regenerated and elaborated, taking up the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio where there is the survival of the small community in the face of the “large disaster”, recalling the period of the plague that can be a parallel with the In the current pandemic, there the Fiorentinos “no longer know whether to fear contamination or looting or hunger any longer, they fall into a disorientation equivalent to paralysis” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 75), the first version of “in the same boat ” is from 1993.
In a period that followed the Babylonian, Egyptian, Syrian and Persian empires, it was in the small Greek communities that the idea of city-state polis was born and that reached the modern republic, it was the Fiorentine Renaissance that an artistic-cultural revolution was born that led the human spirit the first great navigations and the expansion of mercantilism, and it was from Franco-German rationalism that the bourgeois liberal revolution was born and today where are these small groups capable of rescuing civilization?
There are new cosmovisions that are reborn (they seek their first cultural forms) in Africa such as the philosopher Achiles Mbembé and his necropolitics, a reaction to the power to dictate who can live and who can die, in Latin America the Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, the philosopher, psychiatrist and essayist Frantz Fanon, born in the French Antilles.
The central problem of these thoughts is decoloniality, that is, the idea that modernity and its political project made use of colonization and there will be no significant changes in the superstructures of power if this way of thinking is not subjected to criticism and the unmasking of its objectives .
That’s where hopes can be born, a reconfiguration of the globe where peoples have the right to their freedom, their cultural and social expression, with a dignified life.
Emptiness and hyperpolitics
01
Dec
The subject that should interest theologians first interests philosophers
and writers like Julian Barnes (The Sense of an Ending), which won the Man Booker award, wrote: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him” while skeptical Peter Sloterdijk wrote: “In a monotheistically conditioned culture, declaring that God is dead implies shaking all references and announcing a new form of world” (Slotertijk, 1999, p. 59) and implies abandoning the project of planetary unity.
In an opposite line, English literature professor and writer Terry Eagleton wrote “Culture and Death of God”, identifies the Enlightenment substitutes for this death beyond reason and his most finished work: the Modern State, some ways of rationalizing this “death” in addition to the State itself: science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, life force and personal relationships, calling them “forms of displaced divinity”.
As substitutes, Sloterdijk elaborates in “in the same boat: essays on hyperpolitics” (1999): “a literary wave begins that speaks of nothing but the State, life in society, human formation” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 58), says Sloterdijk reflecting Nietzsche that the Theological Code is part: “that which inspires our time with hope and horror; something is dead and can only fall apart faster or slower, but somehow life and civilization advance and crystallize into ununderstood novelties” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 60) and this is not just about the new strain of the coronavirus that scares, but of novelties that advance in polarized and radical discourses.
He recalls that it is not just the speeches of some political adventurer from countries with political upheavals, but: “You can see the political cast parading through the media and we are reminded of the premeditated inappetence of municipal tournaments” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 64) , you know that there are here and there: “convincing megalopaths of the old guard” (idem), but a “global disproportion between the forces in need and the existing weaknesses” (ibid.), or to put it another way, statesmen capable of dealing with contemporary crises .
He calls some of these characters that appear here or there “globality state athletics”, but emphasizes that it has not yet been written highlighting the “required consciences” that it should not have for a “profession: political”, a residence with opacity, a program with which it is difficult to belong, in the Moral aspect of small works, no passion: an absence of relationship, evolution towards self-recruitment based on knowledge and they should be athletes of a “synchronous world” (p. 65).
Sloterdijk’s hyperpolitics sentence is drastic: “the theme of the ‘conservative revolution’, experienced two or three generations ago” (p. 67) in which he predicted a certain kind of new fundamentalist wave, predicted some contemporary politicians like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson they show not only that it was no accident, but that they continue to be on the lookout for a new policy that emerges in the aftermath of the “Krause syndrome” (German politician involved in corruption scandals), showing that it is not the work of chance, it is not just the absence from Geist (spirit) or from the lack of subjectivity and acceptance of planetary cultural diversity, “politics appears as the equivalent of a collective-chronic near-accident on a road covered by fog” (Sloterdijk, 1999, p. 69). The book was written well before the rise of the conservative wave.
In his final sentence Sloterdijk calls for “hyperpolitics to become the continuation of paleopolitics by other means” (p. 92).
Sloterdijk, P. in the same boat: essay on hyperpolitics. Trans. Claudia Cavalcanti. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1999.
